512mb or more?

[the_autopilot]

Hey auto-pilot.  How much $ does your system represent??  My off the cuff guess is at least $3k.  

It represents about 9000 USD plus all my personal time and effort.

[Gary R.]

Wow autopilot. $9k!!!!

[jcogardner]

Gixer's right, more memory won't affect how the scenery looks, but it will load faster and free some system resources to other tasks instead of accessing the page file.

I just upgraded to 1 gig from 512 and noticed a minor improvement in frame rates, maybe 1-2 fps.  The biggest improvement I found was that my system doesn't lag behind as it tries to load scenery tiles, especially when I'm in a detailed area like a Megascenery area.  I was also able to increase, modestly, some of the display settings.  I can now increase autogen and dynamic scenery without losing any fps like I did before.

Go for the gig, it's cheap and you won't regret it.

[Hawkeye313]

jcogardner, that is exactly the answer I needed.   The visuals were not really suffering, but the system was dragging on loading the tiles.  Thx for your input